Requiescat
by XSilverLiningsX
Summary: [Slightly AU origin introspective fused with Mabinogi] On most nights, one could find Kai sitting alone near the end of the bar with his hood drawn up over his head and a pint of ale in his hands.
1. Part I

By now, the more experienced mercenaries know not to bother the man brooding in the corner and oftentimes will go out of their ways to steer the younger ones, always curious about one thing or another, cautiously away from his seat like mice scuttling around a half-awake cat. They whisper quietly, as if they are so sure that he could not hear the trembling words they spoke in a noisy bar, of how _cold_, how _bloodthirsty_, how_ dangerous,_ he is.

The more daring mercenaries spin tales about the formidable Archer in chapters of simmering revenge and unending hatred of Fomors. The gullible ones that feed on the dramatic narratives later on twist stories out of thin air, taking words never spoken and embellishing them for the next batch of recruits to absorb, wide-eyed in both fear and admiration.

They are not wrong, but they are not right, either. After all, who would really ever claim to know the past of a man who doesn't even speak more than four words at any given time? Not a shred of insight ever willingly passes through that ever-present scowl; rarely, however, a morsel of information he deigned to share to the legendary band of mercenaries he was a part of usually was the result of endless needling, cajoling, and shameless bribery on Evie's part.

Not even Gallagher, the most knowledgeable man on every mercenary that ever passed through the Colhen Outpost, has anything to say about him. Thusly so, he was subject to being shrouded in the shadows of the background and much speculation.

Kai, in all truth, found the constant wonderment to be a pointless endeavor; his reasons for turning to a mercenary life were, in actuality, similar to many others. From his own observations, he concluded that the variables that had led many to pick up a weapon against the Fomors – death, loss, tribulation, vengeance – were all interchangeable in so many miserly forms, as evidenced by the constant ebb and flow of empty-eyed men and women making their way into the Mercenary Outpost every day.

His own grievance was simply one such combination, he had reasoned to himself. The grief and suffering was to be expected and overcome, eventually. He does not understand the need to add onto another's shoulders the heavy burden of such intimate events.

Of course, he is also aware that this is his inhuman fault; he had always seemed far too rational, too calculating, and too removed from the concept of emotion (besides anger) that it unnerves many mercenaries that are unfamiliar with his presence.

To be human was something not many gave much thought to, seeing as they, indeed, were human to begin with. But what of the giants? For all their humanity, they were just a shy to the right of suggested normalcy, and they, too, had to learn to adapt if they wished to interact with humans and survive the onslaught of the Fomors.

Kai assumed it would have been the same with the elves, but it is a pity that the race of tribal desert-walkers and their cultural emblems had long since been ground into dust by the Fomors until it seemed like they had never really existed at all.

For all the human-likeness attributes he displays, he was, in the end, a part of those elves. He had always known that his blood was halved and meshed, human and elf, into something not quite normal.

Kai was well aware that he had enough human in him to pass through any town or city without question, but his gait had always seemed somewhat unnatural to a trained eye, whether it was that he could sprint silently in heavy armor or climb the occasional cliff much faster than his comrades.

He is a half-blood, after all, but it's suited him just fine for all these years – being the last fragment of his race, that is.


	2. Part II

Kai had a beginning, but the clarity behind it has bled away from him as all elvish memories were cursed to fade as the Memory Tower had fallen innumerable years ago. He does not regret this; instead, he chooses to hold tightly onto his human ones even more so.

Once, he had a father, though it is all now just vague glimpses of a tall human male that proudly carried a bow. The man had died sometime during the first few years of his life, perhaps around four or five, but it was with his death that spurred his own curiosity with humanity. It was with that drive to understand and comprehend the vastness of the human variable that enabled him, many years later, to learn how to _adapt_ – the most underestimated source of power within the arsenal of man. Human tenacity has served him well, so far.

He, too, had a mother – wraithlike and as silent as the western winds – that had been one of the hunters for her tribe. She had been his primary caretaker after his father had died, and the tribe was his second. It was from her that he learned what it had meant to be a cursed desert-roamer, an elf. The traditional bow became not only a weapon, but an extension of his being. The tribe's endless sands and the towering mesas of sandstone were his training grounds, and it was there that he learned how to shoot, when to jump, and where to aim. It was there that he became an archer not just in title, but also through his athleticism and accuracy. He was not a simpleton that had picked up a bow for fun; he was, effectively, a killer.

Of course, this was not all there was to him. Rather, far from it.

Once, he had a brother – a twin, actually. Elvish culture oftentimes considered such children to be a single soul residing inside two bodies, and he and his brother were treated as such. They had similar names and were trained together on the bow, but somehow they had ended up different. Too different.

These differences put both he and his brother at odds with the rest of the tribe, who had taken to their cultural beliefs like fish to water. In spite of supposedly being one soul, Kai had ended up as the distant, cool-headed, and reserved child that preferred to study tactics, whereas his brother had diverged onto the road of the well-liked, charming, and impulsive hellion that dabbled in magic for both amusement and explosions.

Their lives had more or less been predictable until the point where the Fomors invaded sometime during their early adulthood and crushed all evidence of elvish life deep into the sands, including that of his tiny tribe.

Kai had watched with bloodshot eyes as the Fomors ripped off his brother's legs and left him scrabbling through the dust as he cried out for their long gone Mother. When his brother's lucidity returned for a brief moment as he bled into the sand, he cried out for their younger Sister; this was futile, however, as Kai knew that the Fomors had hung, drawn, and quartered her a few scant minutes before. He knew, because he had watched as her thin little neck snap into an impossible angle before her tiny body was torn apart by hungry mouths.

He only dared to crawl out from his hiding place once the monsters had left and dragged himself over to the mangled body of his other half. He could hear the Elder now, screaming at him for being _a spineless coward, a faithless coward, such a coward he was because he could not even save his own __**sister**_!

His own face (_his brother's, his own, it was impossible to tell in the dying light of the burned out husks of sand-stone dwellings_) staring back, frozen into an expression agony and fear, would stay in his memory for the long years to come. It would never leave, and Kai had spent many sleepless nights wondering what if…

From his brother's grave of ashes as his life burnt into the sands around him, Kai rose into being like a phoenix reborn. No longer could he consider himself to be half of an ill-fitting whole, but rather a half-life that gained awareness of his individualism through a painful transformation. Perhaps he believed he deserved this not-life, his punishment for his cowardice, but most times he simply felt regret and an urge to atone.

After the massacre, he closed that part of his life firmly behind a door and picked up his bow. He travelled through the desert in hopes of becoming a Desert Ghost, but once it was apparent it wasn't going to happen to a half-breed like himself he turned his attention back to the Fomors. He would always turn back to rage against the Fomors.

Years had passed since he last seen the Fomors on such a large scale, but the threat of the Fomors hovering over the humans was too similar to that of his own race's annihilation. He would not stand idly by, like he had with his brother and sister. He would have his revenge by slaughtering his fears into utter submission, just as the Fomors had done to the elves.

He would have his vengeance and Goddess help whoever thought to stop him.

On the first day Kai had arrived at the nearest outpost for mercenary work in Colhen, he was overwhelmed by the continuous noises coming from the humans and the occasional giants. It seemed like there was no room for silence, which was a strange concept to hold. Kai never quite got over that barrier, as to give up his silence would be giving up one of the few things that he ever truly treasured about the elf culture.

Within time, however, he learned that he wasn't so much different from the rest of the humans and giants. His silence and his skills then became not what he had learned, but rather a part of who he was. A grain of truth in a scattered sea of sand, as his Mother once said.

His anger at Fomors, however, grew into a true flame as he became ensnared between the affairs of the Royal Army and the Crimson Blades. With every arrow he put into a Fomor, he is reminded that his brother was no longer by his side, shooting his own arrows and silently laughing at the antics that his comrades find themselves into. He has carried the gnawing sensation of emptiness for a long part of his life by now, but sometimes Kai selfishly allows himself to think that the tightly-knit group of mercenaries might as well be his brothers and sisters in everything but blood (_and younger by several lifetimes, perhaps_) so the emptiness would fade from his awareness for a brief, weightless, _freeing_ moment.


	3. Part III

"Hey, why the long face? I thought you'd look, you know, happy? We did clear Twilight Desert, after all. That place was fucking weird and had way too many cliffs." Kai was drawn from his internal musings as Vella sat down in the empty seat to his right. She waved at the bartender and ordered a bottle of spiced rum.

"…" Kai took a sip from his beer, noticing that sometime during his introspection, the bartender had refilled his half-emptied mug.

"Cheers, then." Vella shrugged at his usual silence and downed half of her rum in one gulp.

A few moments later the door to the bar burst open with a clatter, and Kai didn't need to turn around to know that Lann had practically been thrown _through_ the door. Another one of Evie's mischievous pranks, probably. The man dragged himself onto the bar stool to Kai's left with all the grace of a drunken sloth before dumping his cast-covered left arm onto the bar counter with a miserable thunk. He waved for the bartender to pour him… something alcoholic, but it was more likely that the worker was going to give him something that_ wasn't_. Not that he'd notice, anyways. He was probably loopy on the medicine they had given him for the broken arm.

"Hey, so that's where you two were!" Evie bounced over and sat down next to Vella as Fiona and Karok claimed the next available seats to her right. "Barkeep, give me something fruity!"

Kai took another sip of his ale as he watched as Evie gulped down her fruity cocktail in two swallows before demanding another. Fiona shook her head and Karok rolled his eyes as he ordered some frothy beer. Lann didn't really mind the fruit-drink-that-had-no-alcohol-in-it, judging from the way he was sleepily sipping at it.

As Kai watched his friends (_could he call them family, too?_) make a toast to the success in battle they had today, he briefly wondered what it could have been like if his brother was sitting in his place.

Kai dismissed that thought. This was his half-life now, and he was damned well going to live it.


End file.
